Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Coursera

When I graduated I was pretty sure that I had no intention of going back to school, especially this soon after graduating. School really taught me to hate learning. Don't get me wrong, I learned a lot and it got me a good job. But the last thing I wanted to do on the weekend was learn more. I then fell back in love with learning with the library. Now I realize that libraries are the gateway drug to learning. I am now seven weeks into a sustainable agriculture class with University of Florida.

Coursera is an organization that works with universities around the world to provide free online classes in a vast array of topics. A majority of classes are from US universities taught in English, but there are an increasing number are taught in other languages. The classes are either automatically graded like some of the math and science classes. Written assignments are graded by classmates. You grade three papers and three people grade yours and the scores are averaged. It is not a perfect system and I have heard some complaints but it is a work in progress.

Check it out. Find a course that interests you and learn something new.